Ágota Kristóf - The young twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest

The Notebook
by Ágota Kristóf
translated by Alan Sheridan
introduction by Slavoj Žižek
(Grove Press, October 1988; CB Editions, March 2014)

The Illiterate
by Ágota Kristóf
translated by Nina Bogin
introduction by Gabriel Josipovici
(CB Editions, March 2014)

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf's trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie. When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota's horror is much more terrifying than Agatha's.       
The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest. A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for.
When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: 'You're very kind.'
We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'
If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour's demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back:
'Don't move. Keep sleeping.'
'We want to urinate. We have to go.'
'Don't go. Do it here.'
We ask: 'Where?'
He says: 'On me. Yes. Don't be afraid. Piss! On my face.'
We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.
A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins' closest friend is a priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp:
Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: 'Bread.'
The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: 'I'm hungry too.'
The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly. Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc. I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.
What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.
The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them:
'It's monstrous. Have you any idea what you're doing?'
'Yes, sir. Blackmail.'
'At your age … It's deplorable.'
'Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.'
There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest:
'Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.'
Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say:
'Don't cry, Grandmother. We'll do it; if you really want us to, we'll do it.'
Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them.
We answer: 'We don't want to work for you, madam. We don't want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.'
She asks: 'Then why are you begging?'
'To find out what effect it has and to observe people's reactions.'
She walks off, shouting: 'Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!'
On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside.
It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.
This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. - Slavoj Žižek


There are, among artists, two outstanding types: the artist whose work will last five years, and the artist whose work will last five hundred years. Metaphorically, this is to say that the present is a very uncertain barometer of art’s value, and what might be fashionable today will be easily discarded in the future. The unifying quality among artists of a high caliber, however, is a very deep understanding of the natural state of human beings and an extraordinary sense of detail when it comes to expressing that natural state.

In many ways, much art of worth (that is to say, art that will last beyond its own time) is concerned with the documentation of the inner life of emotions through the exterior form of nature. Frequently, art that stands the test of time expresses common emotion through common experience. (Perhaps this is why so many readers find The Da Vinci Code so poorly written: many of its author’s metaphors are not drawn from immediate experience, but from hypothetical or secondhand experience, giving an intensely unreal atmosphere to the book.) Thus, how simple and beautiful becomes Shakespeare’s description of a person whose character is as “constant as the northern star,” when we ourselves go outside night after night and gaze at that unmoving figure of that celestial body, the only seemingly unchangeable thing in the natural world? Shakespeare at once both expresses the depth of humankind at its best—loyal and with self-control—and the beauty and mystery of the world we find ourselves in. “Two things awe me most . . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” said Kant, and this is perhaps human experience at its greatest point of profundity and truthfulness.
This understanding of both emotional and physical nature as experienced by human beings is particularly true of the work of Ágota Kristóf, whose prose concisely illustrates to the reader the very world around them in its most complete and tragic image. From this we can conclude, I believe, that Kristóf is a great artist, the briefness of her prose and the limitations of her subject matter being the only elements that keep her from the rank of the greatest artists. That Kristóf's work is becoming more widely available in English is commendable, and will hopefully bring the author the greater attention she deserves.
Born in 1935 in Hungary, and forced into exile from that country as Russia invaded and strengthened its hold there in 1956—an event prompted by calls for independence that disconcertingly mirror the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia—Kristóf’s writing is marked by a sense of upheaval and sparseness that she endured for much of her life before and after exile. An emigrant to Austria and then to Switzerland, and adjusting in her new home to both the French language and a new body of literature she could now read (a canon she did not have access to during her early youth), Kristóf was an exile of both country and of language. Cementing her identity as an outsider, Kristóf would earn success in both her adopted homeland and her adopted tongue, publishing her first novel La Grand Cahier (The Notebook) in the mid-1980s with a major Paris publishing house after years of small-scale writing for the stage and for radio and factory work to support her daughter. The discipline Kristóf developed on the hard road to stability is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author's short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. Her translators here expertly mirror Kristóf's precise and moving language, borne out of a discipline that is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author’s short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. It seems appropriate, indeed, to call her prose as hard and precise as steel.
Two works—one a short novel and one an autobiographical essay—that each frame the author’s experience in brief and quiet flashes, The Notebook and The Illiterate balance and flesh one another out wonderfully. Both books detail life in the progression and aftermath of World War II. Squalor and dejection are quite simply the building blocks of reality that characters must cope with in all parts of a harsh and merciless life. The Illiterate details Kristóf’s abandonment of Russian society as she exiles herself with her husband and young daughter to Switzerland and her eventual realization of her identity as an author, while The Notebook is a portrait of the moral desolation of Hungary just before it falls to Russia in the post-war era.
Describing the lives of two young twin boys as their mother leaves them with a grandmother so that they will avoid the horrors of war, and ironically exposing them to some of its greatest horrors, The Notebook is as much about human development, and the conditions under which that development is either allowed to occur or hindered, as it is about life in wartime.
The novel is dominated by profound tragedy and surgically precise language. In fact, the book’s narrator recalls that imprecise language was treated with derision when sculpting out sentences during the process of learning to write: “Words that define feelings are very vague; it is better to avoid using them and to stick to the description of objects and human beings and oneself; that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.” The Notebook’s narrator is therefore quick to disregard all-encompassing words like “love” or “kindness” in favor of what can be readily understood and subject to precise language. And yet, one realizes, what is life like without such words? Are not “love” and “kindness” the only words to live for? The novel goes on to illustrate the consequences of such a life without those words.
As the twins begin their descent into the moral wasteland of war, the conceptual web of their minds begins to lose the use of empathic words like “love” or “kindness”: it is as though their use of language mirrors the decline of their mental faculties. The caveat of such emotionless writing is that all sentimentality is abandoned as untruthful and all major emotions are subject to mistrust. For children who suffer mistreatment from authority figures, this is a sensible but tragic conclusion, and one forged in a violent and pitiless society. It may be said that the twins’ use of a language lacking terms such as “love” mirrors their growth as individuals who see no use for such words. They begin to lose all sense of trust and respect for truth, just as they abandon words that would express such concepts.
Left to earn their meager existence in a bleak agricultural society, the twins quickly come to understand that if they are to survive, they must teach themselves how to outsmart, outman, and outdo the people around them. Bullies, abusers, and murderers dot the landscape in which they grow up, and the twins adjust to this harsh landscape with equal harshness, teaching themselves to slaughter farm animals to overcome an aversion to killing; to steal when rations are low; to blackmail in order to survive. All this becomes cruelly useful when the twins discover that a priest has sexually abused a disadvantaged girl living near them; the book does not lack for other exercises of self-denial and moral violence.
The twins' actions often have misguided but good intentions. By threatening the priest with exposure of his crimes, for example, the boys are able to extort money for food for the young girl in winter, so that she and her deaf and blind mother will not freeze or starve to death. The protagonists never abandon a sense of goodness per se, but in the end their version of goodness permits the greatest evil to occur. As they numb themselves to the pain of living, they numb themselves to deeper emotion. The twins’ behavior is borne out of a makeshift ethics related to the protection of the weak against the strong. (A foreshadowing of Stalin’s rule as Hungary falls to Russia is always dimly apparent in the background of the story. Adult characters voice their fear of their imminent disappearance and execution, for example, as the thought of Russia taking over or an alliance with Germany occurs to them, or are forced into action by a fear of such punishment.)
Indeed, the twins even have an affection for their cruel grandmother, in whose risky care they are left by their mother. The twins develop a work ethic largely to care for this old woman, whose drunkenness, theft of the twins’ money and clothing, and emotional abuse often turns into self-abnegation. Having no moral spectrum with which to compare their grandmother’s behavior, except their own quickly-fading sense of right and wrong, the twins withhold judgment against their elder. Somehow, they view her with both curiosity and a distant and unqualified affection.
It is only as the novel progresses that the twins’  moral system begins to break down. Without the anchor of experience to guide them, the twins simply begin to take the world as it is, reacting to each new situation with brute violence or dishonesty. Hearing an army officer speak of suicide, they gladly offer to help the man by shooting him to death. To them, there is no moral difference between helping someone to accomplish their aim and the long-term effects of their decision. Such, Kristóf seems to say, are the effects of war on the psyche, and such are we responsible for when we allow war to destroy all values. Do the twins pity others? Yes, to an extent. Do they have the framework to understand this pity, and develop it into empathic reasoning? No. Pity is shown to those who are left on the outskirts of society, and anger is reserved for those who take advantage of outcasts. But there is little grasp of varying moral gradients, and when larger ethical issues arise the twins seem to become lost in a psychological maelstrom they are unprepared to deal with. Manipulated by the adults in their society, the twins simply seem not to understand their situations. Under these circumstances, the twins abandon any sense of self-pity and accept their lot with spirit and cunning, acknowledging that in order to survive they must work under brutal conditions for the most basic of their needs. Tragically, this means that they also accept the misfortunes that come to them without defense or understanding. When winter comes and starvation becomes a very real possibility, the twins jump into action to keep themselves and those around them from death, knowing no other force will prevent a terrible end. Conversely, they fall in with a group of adults who take advantage of them, not recognizing the need for their own defense. As the year progresses, and the fighting in the war intensifies, the twins lose all sense of moral equilibrium, and slowly become psychopathic in the moral vacuum of this society, as survival amid brutality slowly turns into extreme mental illness. As the consequences of these changes slowly occur, the twins undergo a truly frightening transformation.
Such negative subject matter would normally bring grief to its readers, but The Notebook allows its readers to empathize with and embrace its characters. The main virtue of the novel is its willingness to explore the depths of human experience. The reader hardly notices, in fact, just how brutal the novel’s scenes can be, and how easily the twins veer from preventing disaster or rectifying injustice to causing it themselves. The novel’s recurring character of “Harelip,” for example, a sexually abused girl that the twins befriend, is the most sympathetic of the story. Amoral but caring when first introduced, an inversion of what the twins themselves will eventually become, Harelip is essentially a human being in its most natural state after withstanding societal abuse: a victim of others. The victimizers are the unnatural ones in this story, for they balance their chances of survival by enacting cruelty to gain an advantage over others. Harelip, in her mental illness, and her longing to be loved, is much more like the filmmaker Robert Bresson’s character Balthazar the donkey, Christlike in her acceptance of the world’s violence. Perhaps a better comparison is Bresson’s Mouchette, the abused girl whose life becomes a never-ending nightmare. Unlike the twins, Harelip is not cunning enough to begin to emulate her abusers to survive. In her seeking of love, hers is the most heartbreaking of the stories of The Notebook.
And how precise are Kristóf’s psychological portraits! Harelip’s abuser’s guilt is revealed in his mannerisms and furtive denials, and their grandmother’s by hers: slips of the tongue, lies that insistently reveal themselves. There is a slightness to these portraits that seems to place Kristóf beneath the sphere of truly great writers (how fascinating it would be to see these characters interact with good people! The children’s mother makes a late, brief appearance, but circumstances prevent the meeting from imparting moral sense or stability), but Kristóf’s eye and her understanding of human motivation and behavior are precise. What results is a great beauty of description and a profound revelation of human nature: that if we are to judge what is good or bad in terms of action, we must first seek to understand the thought process that engendered that action. We then might do much to prevent its happening again.
In a sense, the novel is not about the twins at all, but about Hungary—and in fact all countries—under the threat of war and desperation. In Kristóf’s view, it is a condition that produces monsters. How relevant, when the United States has abandoned Iraq after the 2003 invasion. How many times will the story of the twins play out in that war-torn country, with its populace undeserving of all its suffering? The Notebook is a profound book, then, but one that sits uneasily in the reader’s mind—but all the more important for having caused us to reexamine our deepest critical faculties.
The Illiterate, like The Notebook, gets to the sadness at the core of human existence, but it is a much faster story, covering years of time in the space of only a few chapters and pages. A minor work compared to The Notebook, it is nonetheless a fascinating read, especially in the author’s description of postwar Hungary under Russian rule. The event of Stalin’s death is treated with irony and slyness, and the general poverty and discipline of the age is described brilliantly. The author’s education in a spartan school and the warmth of camaraderie she develops with others demonstrates Kristóf’s own warmth of character: one feels in reading her work like a confidant and friend, and is sad to lift their eyes from the page for fear of losing her steady and disciplined voice.
Kristóf’s stories also feel deeply resonant with current events. Indeed, the Hungary of the 1940s and 1950s seems to share a tone with the United States of recent memory, with poverty becoming an increasingly common state and a general sense of apathy filling the moral atmosphere. When Kristóf finally abandons Hungary, with her husband and infant daughter in tow, on a frightening exodus through the forest to the Austrian border—an escape in which she risked almost certain execution—we are glad to learn that she will eventually discover her ability to place her experience into words. The world would be a poorer place without Kristóf’s examination of our time. - Jordan Anderson

Like many authors in translation, the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf (and no, her name isn’t an eastern European corruption of “Agatha Christie”, as Slavoj Žižek admits he initially assumed in his admiring afterword) has not become widely known in this country. Yet this is not to say her most famous novel, The Notebook, remains an obscure case of succès d’estime, celebrated only by a small circle of devotees. The book, handsomely reissued by CB Editions, has been translated into 30 languages since it was first published in France in 1986 and last year it was made into a critically acclaimed film.

Little is known about Kristóf’s life, but most of what we do know is contained in her short memoir The Illiterate, which came out in 2004 and is now available to us in this excellent translation by Nina Bogin. (Bogin informs us that later in life, despite the lack of detail in these 11 short chapters, Kristóf regretted publishing the book.) Growing up in a remote village, the precocious Kristóf, whose father was the local schoolteacher, contracted early on what she calls the “reading disease”. In 1949, when she was 14, the first major disruption to her life came when her father was imprisoned by the communist authorities (we don’t learn what for) and she was separated from her beloved brother and sent to an orphanage-like girls’ boarding school in the city. It was here that, through necessity and loneliness, she began to write and act.

Without saying goodbye to her family, the 21-year-old Kristóf escaped Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising, crossing the border by night into Austria before finding a home in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. While working in a clock factory and navigating the precarious existence of a refugee, she painstakingly began to “conquer” and then write seriously in an “enemy language . . . killing my mother tongue”. Eventually Kristóf had plays performed in French in a local bistro but her breakthrough came with the publication of The Notebook, which brought her prizes and well-merited international recognition.

The title alludes to the “Big Notebook” of secret diary entries kept by young twins during the tail end of an unnamed war in an unspecified country. Their mother evacuates them from the Big Town, which is under siege, and deposits them at their grandmother’s house on the edge of the Little Town. Grandmother, who makes it clear that she doesn’t want the boys, is a miserly old crone known as “the Witch” and is rumoured to have poisoned her husband. The twins devise toughening “exercises” to immunise themselves against the physical and verbal abuse meted out by Grandmother and strangers alike. They arm themselves with a razor and lash each other with belts, gradually learning to stop crying. They commit, with unnerving calmness, senseless acts of violence, kill animals and conduct experiments in fasting and “immobility” (lying face-down on the floor for as long as possible). Through play-acting as deaf and blind beggars, they learn to scrounge in local taverns; drilling holes in the floor of the attic, they spy on the masochistic foreign officer billeted in Grandmother’s spare room.

The boys strip corpses they find in the forest beyond the garden, full of war deserters and locals attempting to escape across the heavily guarded frontier into “the other country”. Once the occupying forces retreat, as the “New Foreigners” advance to liberate the Little Town, the twins break into what is clearly a concentration camp, heaped with charred bodies. Even without the facts later borne out in The Illiterate – reminiscences of growing up in a border town under Nazi and then Soviet occupation – such details confirm the feeling that The Notebook is a thinly veiled parable of Hungary towards the end of the Second World War.

The boys have their own set of skewed values but just when the reader believes they have displayed some sign of humanity, they jolt you with new heights of pathological cruelty. In this land devoid of moral agency, riven by nameless foreign armies, deportations, forced disappearances, air raids and “liberators”, they clinically record their exploits in the Big Notebook kept hidden in the attic. The aim of these strict “composition exercises” is to set down a record unadorned by opinion or information superfluous to a straight record of fact. It is the spare nature of the narrative that sets up The Notebook’s most grimly humorous moments and makes it such a compelling read.

Most shocking are the accounts of the twins’ hare-lipped young neighbour, who is so starved of intimacy that she indulges in bestiality, later to die “happy, fucked to death” by a gang of foreign soldiers. When the twins’ mother is killed by a shell blast, they bury her in the garden where she fell but later dig her up, polish her bones, re-articulate the skeleton with wire and hang it from a beam in the attic. The Notebook is a transfixing house of horrors. - J S Tennant

 

Ágota Kristóf , The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels, Trans. by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano. Grove Press, 1997.                         

These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by conflict, who must learn every trick of evil and cruelty merely to survive. In The Proof, Lucas is challenging to prove his own identity and the existence of his missing brother, a defector to the "other side." The Third Lie, which closes the trilogy, is a biting parable of Eastern and Western Europe today and a deep exploration into the nature of identity, storytelling, and the truths and untruths that lie at the heart of them all. "Stark and haunting." - The San Francisco Chronicle; "A vision of considerable depth and complexity, a powerful portrait of the nobility and perversity of the human heart." - The Christian Science Monitor

 

There’s an old adage that says history is written by the victors. And another that says war leaves no winners. In her dark trilogy set in a world clearly modeled after post World War II Europe, Agota Kristof questions the realities of war, and puts forth that war leaves behind no truth. These three novels (about 150 pages apiece) vary in style, but build thematically on each other to build a harrowing allegory of war and humanity. The writing is excellent, and the deep emotional ties between twins Lucas and Claus that stretch yet never sever over a lifetime make for compelling narrative. This is the sort of literature that is linguistically accessible and emotionally threatening, with a rewarding end result that leaves readers affected greatly.

The first entry, The Notebook, is also the only one that breaks traditional form. It is written in short one to three page chapters and narrated by both twins in the first person plural. Abandoned to live with their cruel grandmother in a small border town, the twins become resourceful and hardened, learning to rely only upon each other to survive. The town has branded their murderous caretaker a witch, and the exile this causes is magnified by the unforgiving and violent world in which they live. It is a world where the next day is an uncertainty, and humanity wanes:

Two or three hundred of them pass by, flanked by soldiers. A few women are carrying small children on their backs, or cradled against their breasts. One of them falls; hands reach out to catch the child and the mother; they must be carried, because a soldier has already pointed his rifle at them.

No one speaks, no one cries; their eyes are fixed on the ground. The only sound is the noise of the soldiers’ hobnail boots.

The Proof follows Lucas’s life after Claus escapes across the border to the enemy’s country. His life is difficult to say the least, and the book is as cruel and grim as the first. Lucas is one of the most interesting characters I’ve read in a very long time, an outré man both compassionate and pitiless. At fifteen he takes in a woman and her incestuous crippled son, and cares for them as if they were his family. Yet Lucas’s motives are never selfless. His emotional scars show all the way to the surface, and it is hard not to become completely immersed in his eccentricity.

He takes his harmonica out of his pocket and starts to play a sad song, a song about love and separation.

Lucas fastidiously keeps a notebook (a practice he began with Claus in a search for truth amid the lies around them, and presumedly the contents of the first novel) of everything in his life, intended to keep Claus from missing a single thing upon their reunion. It also serves to establish proof of existence for both brothers, who don’t exist in government records due to their unsanctioned upbringing.

The Third Lie is downright heartrending. Much of the reality of the first entries is called into question as Lucas and Claus look to attach truth to their lives and ideas of self while longing for their impossible reunion as a single entity. Some characters and scenes from the previous entries begin to morph and meld together, and the twins’ efforts to define their lives transform a tale of war and failing humanity to something greater. Says Claus:

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t–I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.

She says, “ Yes. There are lives sadder than the saddest of books.”

I say, “Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as life.”

Kristof’s trilogy ends as it begins: truly sad and sinister. But beneath it all there is thin warmth in the assurance that the strongest bonds can never be broken, though the wounds of war are clear:

I go to bed and before falling asleep I talk to Lucas in my head the way I have for many years. What I tell him is just about what I usually do. I tell him that if he’s dead he’s lucky and I’d very much like to be in his place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I who is pulling the greater weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that it’s nonsense, an aberration, infinite suffering, the invention on a non-God whose evil surpasses understanding.

The ultimate confrontation between the brothers is hard to bear but understandably necessary. Like Lucas’s harmonica song, this trilogy is a sad story, a story about love and separation. Sometimes the saddest stories are the best though, as sadness can speak volumes. Anyone looking for a great piece of literature with complex themes and characterization and isn’t put of by a little gloom and violence and despair should definitely read it. - Sean Clark

 

 

“On balance, I would say that 70 years is sufficient. I have lived long enough.” Long enough – and this was in 2005 – to have entered into the history books of modern literature as one of the few writers capable of capturing the horrors of the times.
Agota Kristof, Hungarian by birth, Swiss by adoption and French in her writings, is the author of The Key to the Lift (1999), Yesterday (2002), Revenge (2005) and Where are You, Mathias (2006) as well as numerous plays, but is perhaps most well-known for her Trilogy of the City of K. (1988-1998).
Witness to the invasion of her country by Soviet troops in 1956, she fled with her husband and risked arrest as an anti-communist in Swiss Neuchatel (a city which she never left). She was forced to work in a clock-making shop and arrived late to the written word.
But she arrived with all of the psychological and moral desperation of a daughter of a shocking and pitiful experience, full of the devouring nostalgia of the exile and the radical breakdown of values of a civilization devastated by war and misery.
Two twins animate the trilogy (The Notebook, 1986; The Proof 1988; The Third Lie, 1991), even if they are not always together, beginning with a narrative “we” to a surviving “I” waiting to be re-joined. Two kids in a world, without place or time, crushed by a terrible and unexpected conflict (the Second World War but also the unexpected and unacceptable “red” occupation), are forced to learn how to survive before they can begin to live: to get by, to lie, to leave, to kill, to avoid order and take advantage of disorder. And eventually sow it.
Kristof makes this consecutio the framework of her narrative (war equals physical but also moral annihilation). Her relentless style, which imbues her words with the violence of life, invites the reader to comprehend the failed nihilism of the times, in the conviction that there is no human thing which can act as a remedy.
That phrase, “you need to know how to kill when it’s necessary,” has resonance, unfortunately, and is not easy to contradict when everything has lost meaning, when an unspeakable totalitarianism crushes affections, conscience, individual identity and community memory and imposes an intolerable present, canceling any future hope.
It is no mistake that the protagonists of the Trilogy are adolescents, at least in the beginning, because that is the age when the official lie destroys the fairy tale and installs the tragedy; the brutality of the contingent substitutes the myth and an informed judgment on that which is happening is replaced by the knowledge that something impossible is happening, or rather, has happened.
Denied their normal existence and violently forced to grow up too quickly in an illogical world, they are transformed into inflexible assassins, cold and implacable, but just, according to them. (A condition which brings to mind street children, child soldiers, Palestinians, Africans, “da rua,” and so on.)
Agota Kristof does not speak through symbols or metaphors: their ferociously dark gestures are “assisted,” so to speak, by a crude and cold lexicon, sadly and willingly “distant” from the object narrated. Yet, every stylization is felt and suffered, tormented, penetrated and perturbed. The zero grade of writing, almost telegraphed and never narrated, which in a total absence of light demonstrates gestures and words in the voracious emptiness of a black tale, leaves the reader with the need for air and sky; more than a direct cry, an exemplary warning. - L’Osservatore Romano